Even after recalling everything that had happened before she was captured, Lady Mifaro remained still for a while, as if lifeless.

She had no idea where things had gone wrong.

She tilted her head back to see her wrists, which were tightly bound.

The ribbon was made of soft satin, but the friction from her frantic struggles had left her skin red and stinging. Her elbows, strained from twisting and pulling, ached as well.

But she couldn’t afford to lose consciousness like this.

Just as she was about to gather her strength again—

Knock, knock.

A knocking sound was followed by a voice she never wanted to hear, calling to her from beyond the door.

“My lady.”

Lady Mifaro shut her eyes tightly.

***

“My lady!”

Basking in the sunlight and enjoying a golden rest, Raylin blinked at the maid who practically rolled in when the knocking stopped.

“My lady! Oh, heavens! My goodness!”

“What is it?”

Raylin, forcing her melted, gum-like body to sit up, asked. As if waiting for that moment, the maid burst into an excited flurry of words.

“Lady Mifaro and her escort knight have disappeared! They’ve eloped! Oh my, I never expected this! When she visited, she didn’t say a word about it! But heavens, what in the world is going on!”

The maid, overwhelmed with emotion, had “excitement” practically written all over her face in bold letters.

She continued chattering about how Lady Mifaro and the escort knight had vanished like the wind.

Most of it was inaccurate information and speculation picked up from somewhere, so Raylin half-listened, letting it in one ear and out the other, but her mind was troubled.

She had known Lady Mifaro would go missing soon—but she hadn’t expected it to happen this quickly.

Raylin narrowed her eyes, mercilessly crushing one of the protagonists in the tragic yet scandalous love story spilling from the maid’s lips.

“So that escort knight’s strange eyes finally led to this mess, huh?”

It had only been a day, so there was still a reasonable chance of finding the young lady from the Mifaro family.

But the problem was…

“By the way,” Raylin casually opened her mouth, cutting off the maid’s chatter, then asked her nonchalantly, “Didn’t you think something was a bit off about them yesterday?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

The maid’s eyes widened in curiosity as she leaned in with an eager expression.

“Well, if they were truly so madly in love, wouldn’t there have been some signs? The way they looked at each other, for instance.”

“Oh, come on! That’s because it was a forbidden love! A love without permission! Of course, they would have exchanged secret glances in private!”

The maid waved her hands dismissively as if Raylin had asked something undeniable. But then she hesitated at Raylin’s cold and concise response.

“They didn’t.”

The maid cautiously observed Raylin’s mood before hesitantly asking, “Not at all?”

“The knight did seem to gaze at Lady Mifaro with intense devotion. It was far too passionate for the eyes of a mere escort.”

“See! I knew it!”

The maid’s face lit up again, but Raylin shook her head.

“The young lady, however, did not. The only time she looked at the knight was when they were speaking.”

“That’s… um…”

The maid hesitated, unable to refute Raylin’s words outright. She couldn’t openly contradict her mistress even if she wanted to disagree.

Raylin motioned toward her.

“Send this letter to the Mifaro estate.”

Having quickly written the letter while speaking with the maid, Raylin handed it over and emphasized, “It must be delivered as soon as possible.”

Though startled by the sudden order, the maid nodded diligently and left the room much quicker than she had entered.

As the maid hurried to deliver the letter to the Mifaro residence, Raylin fell into thought.

“Where could they have gone?”

While everyone else gossiped about a romantic elopement, Raylin alone suspected that Lady Mifaro had been kidnapped by her escort knight.

“If that knight truly loves her, he wouldn’t have taken a noble lady and left her in some dreadful place. Perhaps a secluded villa… No. A knight couldn’t own a discreet villa capable of evading an entire noble family’s pursuit.”

It was inevitable that Raylin’s thoughts would drift toward Catherine.

“If it were Catherine, she could easily have one or two such villas.”

Raylin stopped mumbling and let out a sigh, pressing her temples.

Before her regression, Catherine could have owned dozens of villas like that without a second thought.

But now, Catherine was different.

She barely had enough money to be helpful, let alone afford a villa.

Besides, there was no reason for the current Catherine to go out of her way to help an unremarkable knight whose only notable history was working for the Sillion family.

Discarding the villa theory, Raylin shifted her thoughts in a different direction.

Where could a knight afford to imprison someone after abducting them?

The answer came quickly.

“The back alleys.”

A part of the imperial capital where all its darkness seemed to be isolated and concentrated.

Commonly referred to as the back alleys.

A place teeming with criminals, terrorists, agitators, and swindlers.

If anywhere, that was where even a mere knight could easily hide one person without anyone noticing.

Of course, when she said ‘anyone,’ she wasn’t counting the informants lurking in the back alleys. They would certainly know.

“The problem is, I can’t meet with those people myself.”

Raylin’s knowledge of the back alleys and their inhabitants came only from fragmented words Catherine had shared before her regression.

“Meeting with someone from the back alleys? Isn’t that dangerous?”

“As long as the price is clear, they won’t betray you. To them, gold is a faith stronger than any god.”

Money wasn’t an issue.

Being the beloved daughter of the Duke of Greuga, wealth was something she had in abundance.

But would simply walking into the back alleys with gold in hand guarantee reliable information?

Should she leave it to Roir…?

No. If she ordered it, he would move personally. And if that led to an encounter with Catherine—

“Absolutely not.”

Raylin bit the inside of her cheek and let out a long sigh.

In the end, she couldn’t resolve this on her own.

She wasn’t some novel’s protagonist with detective-like reasoning skills, nor did she command an elite investigative unit that could find someone with a single word.

There was no choice but to join forces with others to rescue Lady Mifaro.

However, seeing that even the maid who had been with her throughout the entire visiting hour was rambling on about “the fruit of love” and such, it seemed that getting her opinion across would be quite an ordeal.

“Lady Mifaro must be safe.”

With a furrowed brow, she let out another sigh as she tried to deduce an ally, but, as expected, she soon hit a dead end.

“Ha!”

Raylin quickly read through the short sentences—hardly worthy of being called a letter—that bore the seal of Count Mifaro, then let out a hollow laugh.

Though elegantly worded, the meaning was clear.

“Do not meddle in internal affairs?”

She was the last person to be with Lady Mifaro before she disappeared.

And yet, they wouldn’t even listen to what she had to say?

Raylin suddenly realized the gravity of the situation.

“They rushed the engagement like that because of that rumor after all.”

She didn’t know when it started, but the rumor had spread so widely that nearly everyone knew about it, making it clear that the Mifaro family had hastily sought out a match.

“I didn’t want to believe it, but they say disbelief can be deadly.”

Even her family, who should have been the most desperate to save Lady Mifaro, had fallen for the absurd rumor that she was intimate with her knight.

At this rate, Lady Mifaro would remain a kidnapped victim while everyone else remembered her as someone who had “found love,” and then she would slowly be forgotten.

“Could it be that Catherine has already made her move?”

Logically, since she was confined to the Sillion estate, she shouldn’t have been able to do anything. But as the protagonist of this world, she was capable of anything.

As long as it was entertaining, the protagonist could sometimes ignore logic and make even the most bizarre things seem plausible.

Perhaps she had done something to make the Mifaro family lose all sense of reason and believe the rumor was true…

“No, that’s impossible. Not even she could magically make everything happen this fast.”

When she first heard about the rumor, the maid had said:

“The rumor itself has been around for a long time. But isn’t it common for noble ladies and their knights to have such rumors? In this case, since the knight transferred to another family, people added that he must have done it because he was in love with Lady Mifaro, which made the gossip spread even more.”

That meant the rumor had existed even before Catherine possessed her new body. However, unlike others, it hadn’t naturally died out but instead persisted stubbornly.

Raylin nervously scratched the corner of the letter, thinking so hard that her head hurt.

Catherine hadn’t directly manipulated the rumor.

However, after Lady Mifaro’s disappearance, Catherine had seized control of the most undervalued mine under her name.

Lady Mifaro herself had no connection with Catherine, and upon investigation, it was revealed that her knight had been in charge of guarding the family’s direct lineage until he was expelled from Sillion.

If it had been a kidnapping rather than an elopement in her past life as well…

“That bastard knight must have struck a deal.”

She didn’t know how the two had made such an arrangement, but that wasn’t important.

The fact was, Catherine had lured in a knight blinded by love—or obsession—and used him to secure her gains.

Even if she hadn’t provided him with some extravagant mansion, it was clear that she had some kind of connection with that knight.

“I can’t let that lunatic get her way.”

A deeper, stormy green flickered with a fire of the same hue.